'What's So Great About Christianity'
Vox Day interviews Dinesh D'Souza about his new book, "What's So Great About Christianity."
"What's So Great About Christianity" isn't merely a response to the various atheist books, it's also a positive case for Christianity. What do you consider to be the three most important aspects of that case?
The first is a case that I try to make that Christianity is responsible for the core institutions and values that secular people, and even atheists, cherish. If you look at books by leading atheists and you make a list of the values that they care about, things like the right to individual defense, the notion of personal dignity, equality and respect for women, opposition to social hierarchy and slavery, compassion as a social value, the idea of self-government and representative government, and so forth, you'll see that many of these things came into the world because of Christianity. My point is that even if an atheist is an unbeliever, he should at least acknowledge and respect that Christianity has done a great deal to make our civilization what it is, and is even responsible for many of the values that he cares about.
The second theme of the book is that there is nothing inconsistent or contradictory between theism, in general or Christianity in particular, on the one hand, and modern science on the other. Many Christians become very defensive when confronted by science; they're very nervous about evolution, and I think they're getting too frazzled here. If you look at modern science as a whole, you will see over the past hundred years that there have been spectacular developments that vindicate Christianity. These are thrilling developments: the idea that the universe had a beginning, the notion that not only matter but space and time had a beginning, the implications of the big bang that prior to the universe there were no laws of physics and the notion that the universe is fine-tuned for life. The atheists have little or no explanation, so they are doing acrobatics and backward somersaults to account for them. This should all give heart and intellectual confidence to the believer.
My final theme is to rebut the idea that religion in general, or Christianity in particular, are responsible for the crimes of history. I show, on the contrary, that the crimes of Christianity have been wildly exaggerated while the crimes of atheism, committed not 500 or 1,000 years ago, but in the last century, are far, far worse. Again, this is a point that atheists are trying hard to weave and duck and avoid, but they can't do it. They have to come up with foolish rationalizations and double standards to try to escape what the atheist regimes have done in the name of atheism.
Of the current collection of atheist champions, who do you take most seriously?
There's now a cottage industry of atheist books, and they're of uneven quality. I have a lot of respect for Richard Dawkins, more for his earlier works, in particular "The Selfish Gene" and what may be his best book, "The Blind Watchmaker." I think "The God Delusion" is so suffused with animus and prejudice that it can't be counted as one of his better books. A lot of the leading atheists seem to derive their atheism from Darwinism, and they march behind the banner of modern science, but I would put Christopher Hitchens in a different category; he's more of a literary atheist. I'd even call him a moral atheist. He calls himself an anti-theist rather than an atheist, and I think what he means by that is that it's not so important that he doesn't believe in God, but that he hates God. He certainly hates Christianity, and he's no fan of Jesus. He attacks Christianity for being immoral. It's a very different kind of attack than you get from the other atheists, and in my opinion, Hitchens's attack strikes more deeply at Christianity than that of a Dawkins or a Dennett or a Stephen Pinker. So, I would regard Hitchens as the most formidable of the atheists.
Who do you consider to be the least formidable?
I can't take Sam Harris too seriously. I see him as the goofball in the group. Sam was lucky to be the first atheist horse out of the gate with "The End of Faith."
Speaking of Christopher Hitchens, you recently debated him at King's College, and the New York Observer reported you as the winner. How do you think it went?
It was a very lively debate. There was a big crowd there. A thousand people showed up, and we had to turn about a hundred away. Hitchens had just come off a tour in which he debated a bunch of pastors, and the typical pastor is not used to a spear-chucker like Hitchens, so he's been doing very well. He had a debate with Alister McGrath in D.C. three weeks ago and absolutely destroyed McGrath; it was just painful to watch. So, I was eager for it. I'd debated him twice before, but on other topics.
I think I gave as well, if not better, than I got. There were a lot of atheists in the audience, and the applause was initially strong for his side, but as the debate went on it shifted. Toward the end, I think I can say in fairness that most of the applause was for me. It was a debate that shifted a little bit back and forth, but I think if it was scored on points, I would have come out ahead. But that's me talking, people should watch the debate for themselves and decide.
I thought one of the more interesting points made in "What's So Great About Christianity" was the observation that atheism is itself dualist, being simultaneously pro-and anti-Darwinian. How do atheists justify this secular dualism?
Atheists frame the argument as something they're against so they don't feel they need to present a coherent alternative. They're there to knock down the theist position, and they don't mind making contradictory arguments to do that.
What is the difference between procedural atheism and philosophical atheism, and how does this relate to science?
Procedural atheism simply means that science looks for natural explanations. In this sense, science is procedurally closed to God. Philosophical atheism holds that since science cannot find God, therefore God does not exist. Philosophical atheism is in my view a metaphysical position. Atheist writers often muddle procedural atheism and philosophical atheism in order to imply that one leads to the other. In fact, the transition is a non-sequitur.
You obviously accept the theory of evolution, but you point out that its explanatory power has limits that are ignored by Dawkins and company. What is the significance of those limits.
Evolution doesn't explain the origin of life. It doesn't explain consciousness, and, despite some heroic efforts, it doesn't explain morality. I'm not making a God-of-the-gaps argument arguing that because evolution can't account for it, therefore God did it. But neither should we submit to the atheism-of-the-gaps, that holds since science explains some things, it can surely explain everything.
This column is an excerpt, the complete interview with Dinesh D'Souza can be read at Vox Popoli.